Pay-as-you-go business models have been used in many areas of commerce, from cellular telephones to commercial laundromats. In developing a pay-as-you go business, a provider, for example, a cellular telephone provider, offers the use of hardware (a cellular telephone) at a lower-than-market cost in exchange for a commitment to remain a subscriber to their network for a period of time. In this specific example, the customer receives a cellular phone for little or no money in exchange for signing a contract to become a subscriber for a given period of time. Over the course of the contract, the service provider recovers the cost of the hardware by charging the consumer for using the cellular phone. In addition to implementing the pay-as-you-go business model via subscriptions, another implementation of the pay-as-you-go business model allows the customer to pre-pay for a block of service units, i.e., “pay-per-use.” Using the cellular phone example, the customer may pre-pay for a block of 300 minutes. At the end of the 300 minutes, the customer may purchase additional blocks of service time or may return the phone to the service provider. The service provider may then contract out the phone to a different user.
The pay-as-you-go business model may incorporate a model of perpetual ownership. As part of a user agreement or contract, a service provider may allow the customer to take full unfettered ownership of the device after certain contractual conditions have been met. For example, the customer may take perpetual ownership of the device after a subscription period of so many years, or after having purchased so many blocks of service units. At the time of perpetual ownership, the service provider may turn off or disable pay-as-you-go features in the device and the customer may take possession of the device in a non-pay-as-you-go configuration.
The pay-as-you-go business model is predicated on the concept that the hardware provided has little or no value, or use, if disconnected from the service provider. To illustrate, should the subscriber mentioned above cease to pay his or her bill or the pay-per-use customer does not purchase additional blocks of time, the service provider deactivates the account, and while the cellular telephone may power up, calls cannot be made because the service provider will not allow them. The deactivated phone has no “salvage” value, because the phone will not work elsewhere and the component parts are not easily salvaged nor do they have a significant street value. In most cases, however, even though the phone has been deactivated it is still capable of connecting to the service provider in order to arrange restoration of the account. When the account is brought current, the service provider will re-authorize the device on its network and allow calling.
This model works well when the service provider, or other entity taking the financial risk of providing subsidized hardware, is able to enforce the terms of the contract as above. Because an electronic device, such as a computer, may have useful functions even when not connected to a network or server, a pay-as-you-go device may be responsible to self-administer contract enforcement. When the electronic device is responsible for self administration, a clock circuit may become a prime target for tampering because many business models are time based. For example, a subscription good for one calendar month may never expire if the clock is tampered with to keep the time within the valid month.
The communication between entities in the pay-as-you-go system requires a unified schema to support the various forms of packets. The schema needs to be elegant and robust to support provisioning, metering, and other types of configuration messages as well as to provide a foundation for any future messages needed for product evolution. The schema also needs to have security at multiple levels to guard against malicious users who may try to hook into the system to fraudulently use and/or configure the electronic devices for their own use and gain.